Born in Japan in 1875, Yone Noguchi left his home country for San Francisco in 1893. For a time, he worked as a journalist and domestic servant, but eventually turned his hand to poetry. He had a strong interest in English from an early age, and often adapted Japanese poetry forms, such as haiku, to English. With poetry published in The Lark, a San Francisco-based magazine, and his novels The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902) and its followup The American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid, he became the first Japanese-born author to publish in the English language.
In 1900, Noguchi departed San Francisco for the East Coast. On the way, in Chicago, he met Otono Watanna, and in Washington D.C., he connected with Charles Warren Stoddard, an author with whom he had exchanged long-term correspondence. Stoddard was gay; based on Noguchi's letters, he and Noguchi likely had an affair around this time.
Noguchi remained in New York for a time, but had difficulty publishing there. Travels to England brought him in contact with literary royalty there, including William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy. It was not until the Russo-Japanese War broke out in 1904 that he, as well as many other Japanese authors, found their work in demand. During this time, he wrote "A Proposal to American Poets," encouraging Americans to try on Japanese styles of poetry, particularly the “hokku,” or haiku form. His invitation was accepted, leading to the mass popularity of haiku outside Japan.
In addition to Stoddard, Noguchi was romantically entangled with his editor, Léonie Gilmour, and Edith Armes, a fellow journalist who also served as his editor. At one point, he was married to the former and engaged to the latter. Plans to marry Armes in Japan fell apart when Gilmour, in Los Angeles, gave birth to Noguchi’s son Isamu Noguchi, who would grow up to be a famous sculptor.
Back in Japan in 1904, Noguchi continued to write, as well as translating numerous Japanese works into English, and English works into Japanese. He lectured at universities throughout Europe and America, and eventually published poetry in Japanese, although ironically his poetry in his native language received little critical notice. He died in 1947 in Tokyo.
A Poetry Sampling
The Poet
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Comes like the stir of the day:
One whose breath is an odor,
Whose eyes show the road to stars,
The breeze in his face,
The glory of heaven on his back.
He steps like a vision hung in air,
Diffusing the passion of eternity;
His abode is the sunlight of morn,
The music of eve his speech:
In his sight,
One shall turn from the dust of the grave,
And move upward to the woodland.
At Night
At night the Universe grows lean, sober-
faced, of intoxication,
The shadow of the half-sphere curtains
down closely against my world, like a
doorless cage, and the stillness chained by
wrinkled darkness strains throughout the Uni-
verse to be free.
Listen, frogs in the pond, (the world is a pond itself)
cry out for the light, for the truth!
The curtains rattle ghostlily along, bloodily biting
my soul, the winds knocking on my cabin door
with their shadowy hands.
Works
https://terebess.hu/english/haiku/noguchi.html Hokku (Haiku) and essays.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Voice_of_the_Valley The Voice of the Valley (poetry collection)
https://librivox.org/selected-poems-of-yone-noguchi-by-yone-noguchi/ Poetry Collection
https://archive.org/details/japanesehokkus01nogu Japanese Hokkus (Haiku)
https://archive.org/details/selectedpoemsofy00nogurich/mode/2up Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi.
https://archive.org/details/americandiaryofj00noguiala/americandiaryofj00noguiala/ The American Diary of a Japanese Girl
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/63256 Assorted works.
https://archive.org/details/americanletters00nogugoog American Letters of a Japanese Parlor-maid
https://archive.org/details/throughtorii00noguiala/page/146/mode/2up Through the Torii (essay collection)
https://archive.org/details/storyofyonenoguc00nogu The story of Yone Noguchi, Told by Himself
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62252 The Spirit of Japanese Art
https://archive.org/search?query=yone+noguchi
SOURCES/FURTHER READING
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yone_Noguchi
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/people/yone-noguchi
https://poets.org/poet/yone-noguchi
https://allpoetry.com/Yone-Noguchi-
https://www.huntington.org/verso/yone-noguchi-and-haiku-united-states
http://www.themargins.net/bib/D/d15.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/438081 “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism.” Yoshinobu Hakutani, Modern Philology, Vol. 90, No. 1 (Aug., 1992), pp. 46-69
https://www.enotes.com/topics/yone-noguchi/criticism/introduction
https://archive.noguchi.org/ Archives of Isamu Noguchi, Yone Noguchi's son